1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a continuous-use magnetic media eraser/degausser, which utilizes elaborately shielded state-of-the-art Rare Earth Magnets (NdFeB) to uniformly remove magnetically recorded information. The media can be VHS video tapes, 8 mm camcorder tapes, audio tapes, floppy disks, Zip disks, or most any other video, audio, or digital media small enough to traverse the 1.0625 inches high by 4.125 inches wide tape transport pathway which passes over the powerful neodymium permanent magnets.
2. Description of the Related Art
In previous years, hundreds of millions of magnetic media items have been sold to individuals and businesses for recording video, audio, or data. There likely will become a time when many of these individual users will want to dispose of some or all of such video and audio recordings to ensure that any unwanted recorded matter does not get into the wrong hands. Likewise, many millions of floppy disks and Zip disks, which contain data no longer needed, pose a similar problem. Both problems can be solved with an appropriate magnetic media degausser if such a degausser is both economical and practical for normal household or office use.
New procedures are being developed relating to the requirements associated with the use of surveillance video recordings, which may be submitted as evidence in a court proceeding. The requirement in general states that before a video tape can be submitted as evidence, it must be proven that it was completely erased before it was reused. To support this requirement, all such used surveillance tapes having data no longer required should be degaussed, annotated as such, and then returned to the surveillance tape library for reuse.
The current market offers a broad range of electrically operated magnetic media degaussers, ranging from the lesser expensive five-pound hand-held models at less than $100 to the most expensive floor models weighing hundreds of pounds and costing over $14,000. The market provides access to many expensive electrically powered degaussers, but it appears that the production and use of currently more practical and significantly less costly permanent-magnet degaussers, containing powerful neodymium (NdFeB) magnets, is not consistent with the capabilities offered by the new emerging rare earth magnet technology.
Effective and efficient use of the Rare Earth Magnet technology would avoid one major disadvantage of electrically powered degaussers, which is the excessive heat build-up from high current requirements. This power requirement not only adds to operation expenses, but the heat build-up, if not properly controlled, can disrupt and limit operations due to periodic shutoff to allow for component cooling.